One of San Francisco’s Most Famous Houses Is Hosting a Pop-Up Museum of Street Artist Fnnch’s Honey Bears
Visitors to the Pink Painted Lady near Alamo Square Park will be able to see 116 editions of fnnch’s honey bear paintings
Elizabeth Djinis, for Smithsonian Magazine
History Correspondent August 11, 2025
See the CBS interview with fnnch here.
Go here to get entry to the fnnch Museum, or just show up.
Since 2015, painted honey bears have popped up on San Francisco buildings. In that time, they have become symbols of the city, even if they’re not exactly beloved by all of its inhabitants.
These murals and their artist, known by the name of fnnch, will now have their own pop-up museum in one of San Francisco’s iconic Painted Ladies, a row of colorful Victorians that line Alamo Square Park. The artist announced on his Instagram last month the opening of the “Fnnch Museum,” what he calls a “retrospective of 10 years of Honey Bear paintings.” The show will include an example of each of the 116 editions of honey bears he has created since his very first in January 2015. Guests can attend the exhibit for free but must register at this link—it will run Wednesday through Sunday, 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., through October.
“Never before have all the bears been in one space,” fnnch wrote on Instagram, “and I guarantee there are some you have never seen.”
The pop-up exhibit will also feature a timeline of the various honey bears, with descriptions and photos of the ideas behind many of them.
“The honey bear is positive, nostalgic and inclusive,” fnnch told CBS News Bay Area’ Loureen Ayyoub in a televised interview. “It’s something positive for people to enjoy….It’s inclusive because it doesn’t require a lot of cultural knowledge—you see it and you can understand it right away. You don’t have to have studied art history to get what it means and to enjoy it.”
Yet not everyone has agreed with fnnch’s interpretation of his own art. Part of that has to do with the muralist’s own identity, which, while anonymous, “is widely believed to be a straight white man who works in the tech industry,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Zara Irshad.
“Critics argue his Honey Bear murals, which proliferated during the COVID pandemic, are emblematic of privilege and displaced marginalized local artists who are people of color,” Irshad wrote.
This re-understanding of fnnch’s own work has even affected the journalists who once glowingly featured him. In a 2021 piece for KQED, writer Rae Alexandra detailed her change of heart after including fnnch in a 2018 list of six prolific muralists in San Francisco. Only three years later, she wasn’t sure if she would still say that his pieces made the city “a more cheerful place to be.”
“In the past 12 months, San Francisco has become so oversaturated with fnnch’s honey bears that what was once an occasional sugar rush now feels like a nausea-induced force-feeding,” Alexandra wrote.
Her column detailed how fnnch’s art went from merely representing a perhaps too-bland idea of what San Francisco could be—seen as “too generic, too clean-cut, too…safe,” she wrote—to actually attempting to engage with serious political and social issues, like the Black Lives Matter movement and voting, with little context and little risk. At a certain point, it’s the sheer ubiquity of the honey bear image with which critics take issue.
Fnnch, for his part, touts the project’s accessibility in the Instagram post announcing the project.
“I believe art is for everyone, and these artworks are my attempt to make quality paintings more accessible,” he wrote on Instagram.
Aside from any perceived backlash of the art, the pop-up museum will also offer visitors a unique opportunity to see inside one of the Painted Ladies, the pastel-colored homes on the east side of Alamo Square Park that offer a decidedly turn-of-the-century contrast to the city’s more modern skyline in the background.
In the interview with CBS News’ Ayyoub, fnnch explained the story behind the pop-up exhibit’s location. He and his wife had actually purchased the home, known as the Pink Painted Lady, but were unable to secure the relevant permits to remodel and attempted to sell the house in 2022. They were unsuccessful, and the Pink Painted Lady, according to fnnch, “sat empty ever since.”
The opening of the house will mark only the second Painted Lady available for public entry, according to KRON-4’s Aaron Tolentino. San Francisco’s Blue Painted Lady House also offers daily tours for $35 per person.